NASA is heading back to the Red Planet.
The firm has unveiled a new rover, a car-sized explorer robot named Perseverance, on Mars as a component of an ambitious project for the planet in search of evidence of ancient life.
The rover, which entered orbit Thursday at 7:50 a.m. ET, is designed to examine the geology and climate of Mars. NASA said the project and its upcoming discoveries can lay the groundwork for imaginable human exploration of the red planet.
Perseverance is loaded with seven clinical tools to explore the Martian landscape and assess whether the planet has ever kept life. The six-wheel rover also carries a small helicopter, called Ingenuity, for experimental control flights in the thin mars environment, which, if successful, would mark a vital milestone in motorized flight.
“For the first time, we’ll fly a helicopter to the planet,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said Monday at a press conference, adding that long-term missions to other worlds can use similar helicopters as air scouts.
The Perseverance rover was introduced aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida. Crowds gather along the beaches near Cape Canaveral to watch NASA launches; However, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the firm has encouraged area enthusiasts to stay at home and participate virtually, especially as new infections continue to increase in Florida and across the country.
Matt Wallace, deputy director of assignment assignments at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said the rover has already lived up to its name, while engineers persisted during the pandemic to prepare the spacecraft for its expected launch.
“Nothing prepared us for what we had to face in mid-March when it hit the pandemic, just our team, but communities across the country and the world,” Wallace said. “At this mission level, we were in our final meeting activities.
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NASA had a narrow 20-day launch window in which Earth and Mars orbits are optimally aligned. If the project had been delayed beyond that, due to the pandemic or otherwise, the company would have had to wait “a few years” for the next opportunity, he said.
But Wallace said the groups have controlled complicated cases and that the rover is about to begin its adventure to Mars. As a nod to the effect of the pandemic and the heroic movements of fitness personnel around the world, project engineers placed a plaque on the rover with an engraved symbol of the spacecraft leaving Earth, with the planet sitting above the medical symbol of a cane with a snake intertwined around it.
The symbol is intended to “symbolize the challenge we face in the world when it hit the pandemic,” Wallace said. “Of course, all this is very well supported by the rod and snake of the medical community.”
NASA’s Perseverance caps off a busy streak of Mars missions. The rover was the third spacecraft to launch to the Red Planet this month. China’s Tianwen-1 mission, which includes a Mars orbiter, lander and rover, lifted off on July 23. And the United Arab Emirates successfully launched an orbiter named Hope to Mars aboard a Japanese rocket on July 20. All three missions are expected to reach Mars early next year.
The Perseverance spacecraft will now spend about 6½ months cruising through space before trying to land on the Martian surface on Feb. 18.
The rover is expected to land in Jezero Crater, a site that was once an ancient delta of a river. Satellite observations of the region’s clay minerals recommend that it was flooded with water more than 3.5 billion years ago, making it an intriguing place to look for symptoms of ancient microbial life.
Perseverance is supplied with a radar that penetrates the floor to read about the geology of the crater, tools to study the chemical composition and mineralogy of the rover’s rocky environment, an ultraviolet laser to map the biological compounds of the site and meters to record the Martian climate, adding temperature. , wind speed and humidity.
The rover is also conducting an experiment to check whether carbon dioxide from the environment can be used to produce oxygen. If the experiment succeeds, scientists can use generation to expand human remains survival systems on Mars, Bridenstine said.
Another goal of the project is to collect rock and soil patterns that NASA plans to bring back to Earth on a long-term expedition. Cached specimens are the first step in the agency’s ambitious plan to carry out the first pattern retracement project since March.
Perseverance will be NASA’s last robot scout on Mars since the Curiosity rover landed in 2012. The mission, aimed at astrobiology, could revolutionize scientists on Mars.
“We’re going to make surprising and unexpected discoveries,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Scientific Missions Directorate. “The maxim things that take place in those missions are the things we haven’t planned. These are discoveries that rewrite textbooks around the world.”